Follow the author of this article

Well, turns out those delicate heroines of yore might have been better off than Disney's modern gals.

In analysing how much the animated women speak in films, researchers have uncovered an unlikely pattern: today's princesses speak far less than the female Disney stars of the 1950s and 60s. And male characters, perhaps less surprisingly, speak far more than women in every film.

Disney classics - Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty - have the heroines uttering between 50 and 70 per cent of dialogue.

Things have got much, much worse since.

Linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer are in the process of analysing every single line of dialogue in Disney’s 12 animated princess movies from 1937 to 2013.

In 1989, The Little Mermaid was hailed as a 'feminist' Disney princess.

“Ariel is fully realised female character who thinks and acts independently, even rebelliously,” Roger Ebert wrote.

The New York Times called her “a spunky daredevil.”

Yet, the researchers have found she and flamboyant sea-witch Ursula only speak 32 per cent of the film's lines.

In Aladdin, female characters speak only 10 per cent. While in Mulan, despite the eponymous character saving China, female characters utter 23 per cent of the dialogue.

And Frozen? Despite having two female leads and apparently being a 'feminist masterpiece', women only have 41 per cent of the speech.

Percentage of lines given to female parts

50

Cinderella

60

Snow White

50

The Little Mermaid

32

Mulan

23

Aladdin

10

Beauty and The Beast

29

Pocahontas

24

Princess & The Frog

25

Frozen

41

Tangled

52

Brave

74

Newer films Tangled and Brave do fare slightly better, with female characters speaking 52 and 74 per cent of the lines.

“There's one isolated princess trying to get someone to marry her, but there are no women doing any other things.

“There are no women leading the townspeople to go against the Beast, no women bonding in the tavern together singing drinking songs, women giving each other directions, or women inventing things. Everybody who’s doing anything else, other than finding a husband in the movie, pretty much, is a male.”